Well, I made my trip to Cali and as promised, here’s the report.
1. The actual flying part of the trip:
Left on the morning of May 18, returned the afternoon of May 28. Dallas to Houston (Continental), change planes, Houston to Panama City (Continental), change planes, Panama City to Cali (Copa Airlines). Exact reverse coming back. $US 672 round trip, not a bad price, I used a Dallas based consolidator service to book the tickets. I can’t remember their name right now and I haven’t unpacked well enough to find the receipt, but I’ll look for it and give the name and phone number if anybody wants it. Both airlines gave good service and had decent food (well, decent ‘airline food’ anyway) and clean well maintained equipment. Arrived at Cali on time, no problems except the (*&^% airports won’t let you smoke and the connections are too close to risk going outside and then going back through security or you may miss your flight (of course I can hear all you non-smokers cheering in the background). Coming back the weather was bad at Houston and we missed the first approach but landed safely on the second try. At Panama City, security took away my lighter and all my matches, the lady right behind me had several books of matches and they let her keep one book. I said “how come she can keep one pack of matches and I can’t?” They said because hers are book matches and yours are box matches, rules say passenger may have one BOOK of matches, no lighters, no box matches, so I didn’t press the point. The homeward bound layover in Houston was long enough to grab a smoke and some kindly Englishman making a connection for London was kind enough to give me his spare lighter. I had to go through the “special” search at the Houston customs because I checked “yes” where it says, “did you bring any plants?”…I had some leaves from a coffee tree and figured better to tell them then not tell them and have them find them anyway and think they were something else….So the guy says “What kind of plants do you have, sir?” and I said “Coffee” and he asked to examine them, so I took them out of the suitcase they were in and handed them to him. He called a supervisor over and said, “This gentleman voluntarily declared these, says they are coffee leaves”. The supervisor looked them over, smelled them and said “I don’t know for sure if they’re coffee leaves, but the aren’t coca leaves, so he’s all right” and gave them back to me. While he was doing this, they had a dog sniff my bags, but the dog said everything was cool and they didn’t even open the other bag. Whole incident took less than two minutes and then I was on my way to the connecting flight to Dallas.
2. Meeting at the airport in Cali:
Martha and her 23yo daughter Sandra and a neighbor friend were waiting for me at the airport. Took a while getting through immigration and customs (no hassle, just a lot of people they had to process), and they were getting worried about me. I kind of threw them a curve, all the pictures that Martha had of me I had a mustache but I had shaved it off just before I left. But Martha was wearing the dress she said she would (I have pictures of her in this dress) so I spotted her right away when I finally got out of customs and when we saw each other she recognized me also, even without the mustache.
3. The Hotel
Martha wasn’t sure of a good hotel (hey, she LIVES there, so she doesn’t stay in hotels, right?). I had a guidebook and was reading hotel information from it to her over the phone a few days before I left and I would say “How about this place, the XYZ, $US22 per day?” and she said “I don’t know it, what’s the address?” and when told the address her response was “You can’t stay THERE, I don’t want you killed before I get to marry you!”. This pattern was repeated four or five times and finally she said, “Let me look around and I’ll find you a nice, safe one as near my house as possible.” So I wound up at:
Metropolis Plaza, corner of Carrera 44 and 9th street. 121,000 pesos per night. Not worth it. Yeah, it was safe and clean, but defiantly not worth the price and the service wasn’t very good either. (121,000 pesos per day, about $53US, I’d say the place was actually worth about $25US per day). The air conditioning sucked. The windows had all been sealed shut, so you had to use it, but you could not control it yourself, you had to go down to the desk and ask them to turn it on….and when it was on, brother it was ON, you froze to death in about an hour and had to go back and tell them to turn it off. They had a pool, up on the roof, but it was broken for several days and we only got to use it once. The actual building is not too bad and neither is the location, but I know I won’t be staying there again, not at their current prices anyway, and recommend that you don’t either. Martha felt really bad about this, particularly since she and a friend with a car had spent 2 days driving around scouting hotels that were a) safe b) as close as possible to her house c) affordable d) had a pool—of course with the pool being broken, we paid for it 10 days and only got to use it once. But she agreed that despite her efforts the hotel didn’t work out as well as she had hoped, and that it wasn’t that I was too picky, she was the first one to bring up that the hotel was not satisfactory, the very first day I was there when all they gave me was scrambled eggs, orange juice and coffee instead of the “full buffet American style breakfast” she had been promised and that they even had a big sign advertising was included in the price of the room. When she arrived in her taxi and found out that was all they had given me, she actually went up to the manager and said, “What kind of place are you running here? I try to find my Novio a nice place to stay and the very first day here you don’t even feed him right!”. The manager mumbled some kind of apology/excuse about “we don’t serve the full breakfast on Sunday” and she said, “Well, that’s not what you told me when I booked the room and you took his money!”. After that, they always gave me the full breakfast, but once they charged me 2000 pesos extra because I had bacon instead of the “included” ham.
4. Interesting scenery near the hotel:
One sight you DON’T want to miss, every Sunday morning they close Carrera 44 (and some other streets as well, they make a loop through the city, I think the entire route is about 10 or 15 miles, they print a map of it in the newspaper) to cars and it’s “bicycles only”-----MAN, you need to see those ladies going by riding bikes wearing their shorts and halter tops!
5. A couple of side Trips:
Martha has a friend (besides the one who met me at the airport) whose husband is an executive at the Goodyear tire plant and they are pretty well off. This friend has a 4-door 4 wheel drive Toyota pick-up and a couple of days we went out of town with the friend driving. One day we went two or three places not too far out of town and wound up at Jamundi (I think that’s how it’s spelled), a little village maybe 15 or 20 miles out of Cali, and another day we went way out in the sticks, down back roads through miles and miles of sugar cane fields to a museum called Hacienda El Paraiso, which was the actual house and estate grounds where the historical novel “Maria” took place. To be quite honest, I am not familiar with the story, but apparently it is quite popular through all of Latin America (my ex-wife, a Costa Rican, said that she has read it when she was in high school and she scarffed up the copy of the book that I had purchased, which I had actually intended to give to somebody else, but hey, she kept my dog while I was gone, so I didn’t make an issue of it) and of course Martha & her friend and her daughter have all read the book as well. They say the place is really packed on the weekends, besides the museum itself, people use the grounds to picnic and sometimes have their weddings (we went on a weekday and had the place to ourselves except for the caretaker, the souvenir store clerk and the snack bar lady and a really friendly and competent guide, who’s services were included in the 3000pesos price of admission—oh, and a couple of dogs that belonged to the caretaker, the dogs were quite certain that the only reason we had come was to play with them!). The building was the actual home of the family that the novel is about and they must have been millionaires, because the place is really nice. I would recommend going to this place, except you need a car (and a local friend willing to drive you---although they do run tour busses to it on weekends) or you will never be able to find it, it is way out in the sticks. It isn’t very far from a “history of sugar” museum/plant tour run by one of the big sugar companies and we were going to go to it also, but it was getting late and we could either do it or visit “Chucho” (accent on the final ‘o’), an artist and photographer who lives in a little village maybe 5 miles from the museum, in a very old house (part stone, part appears to be bamboo wood) that he is trying to turn into a museum as well. The friend had seen him being interviewed on TV recently and she wanted to visit him so that’s where we went (hey, she was driving). Chucho turned out to be very nice and the friend wound up booking a photography sitting appointment with him for her family. His house is small, maybe 1000 square feet, and is jammed packed with old clocks, typewriters, radios, record players (the crank up kind with the big horn, he had two of them, they both work) and tools etc. and a lot of the costumes and props he uses for his photography business. And next to the house are a 56 Dodge and a 49 or 50 Buick. Chucho says that he’s got the Dodge “kind of running, but not yet ready to take on the road” and he’s trying to scrounge parts for the Buick (good luck!). Quite a friendly and interesting character he is…but again, you aren’t going to find him unless some local takes you there.
6. Guerrilla Encounter?
Back to Jamundi---it’s supposedly a “rebel friendly” village, if you know what I mean. We were eating some kind of fruit cocktail from a street vendor (it was great, BTW) and sitting on some benches just talking and suddenly the friend said “Michael, be quiet, don’t say ANYTHING” and said something to Martha that I didn’t catch and Martha and Sandra looked around and became very worried and said “Yes, Michael, please be quiet” and about a minute later they said “get in the truck, we’ve got to leave, right now”. When we were on the road they explained “This is a FARC controlled village, and we saw these two guys noticed your accent and they passed by us 3 times just to listen to you, to make sure, and then they went off about 2 blocks down the street and started talking to some other guys and pointing at us, we think they are FARC or informants for them, or at the very least, common street criminals, and were pointing you out to the others as a good target, so we decided to leave ASAP”…….I DON’T think they were kidding about it either, all 3 of them were really scared.
7. More rebel business.
As you know, there was actual house-to-house shooting in the streets of Medellin a few days ago, but near as I could tell, Cali remained calm. Friday before the elections there was a rumor that they (FARC) had killed Ingred Bentencort (the presidential candidate they have been holding hostage since February) and you could feel a lot of tension in the air, but a couple of hours later TV and radio said the rumor proved to be false and everybody just went back to business as usual. Although the FARC also blew up an important bridge somewhere and a few electric lines, people I talked to were expecting MUCH worse from both FARC and ELN to attempt to disrupt the elections and were all relieved that there was so little violence. Sad to say, but (my opinion anyway, based on what I observed) was that the Colombians have simply come to expect and tolerate the violence in the same way Brits just accept the fact that they have bad weather. It’s kind of like “Of course we don’t like it, but what can one do except stay indoors when it rains?” I don’t know the answer to this myself or I would gladly give it to them.
8. Another side trip
Another day, Martha and Sandra and I went downtown and then rode a bus out to Buga, a village (or perhaps a “small city”, from the size of it, it had a dozen restaurants and at least 5 or 6 hotels) about 40 or 50 miles from Cali. Buga is a religious shrine, in the year 15xx or 16xx (OK, so I don’t remember the date) the Virgin appeared and told the locals to build her a shrine and they did, it is a HUGE church, made of stone, but painted to look like brick, very beautiful both inside and outside, and attracts pilgrims seeking cures from all over Colombia and some other countries as well, ala the Shrine of Guadalupe in Mexico. It wasn’t even Sunday and there were probably 200 or 300 people, maybe more, attending the mass (and the posted schedule showed 6 masses per day, they probably had that many worshipers at each mass). The whole town is very pretty and the people friendly, except at one particular restaurant. We ate there and even after we ate and paid, they would not let us use their restrooms, what nerve! I could see them saying no if we weren’t customers, but we had just paid about $15.00US to them for three complete meals and they still wouldn’t let us. We went to the restaurant across the street and even without buying anything, they let us use their restroom. We got some nice shots of Martha petting and kissing a llama. A man had two of them in the plaza. The female was pregnant and he was trying to sell her expected baby for about $300US (but he would probably have taken $200US or maybe even less). Then he let a little girl ride the male llama while he led him around on a bridle, just like pony rides in the US….we got video of that too. While we were there I got some sterling silver jewelry for my daughter, great prices on the silver. I’m putting Buga on my “must return to” list.
9. Downtown museums, shopping etc.
One day, Martha and I went downtown to see a couple of museums. We went to the Gold Museum, not all that big, but FREE and they have a lot of old Indian golden items, necklaces, bracelets etc. and some pottery etc. I recommend it. We also went to the Merced church, which if I understood correctly is the original Catholic church in Cali---it’s pretty good too, besides a functioning church (where we attended mass) they have a museum with a mummy and a few skeletons and a lot of pre-colonial pottery and such. It was worth the trip. Of course the church itself is free, but there is a fee for the museum, I can’t remember, it was either 2000pesos or 4000pesos each, guide included. On the grounds of the church some coca bushes are growing, and I actually touched one……oooh, thrill. They said they were allowed to have a few because they fit in with the museum theme or something like that that almost made sense.
10.Casinos:
After the two museums, we did some shopping downtown and I noticed a casino and said, “Hey, let’s go there”. Martha said she had never been in a casino in her life, which surprised me, because a day or two before she had said when she gets her visa that she wants our wedding to be in a casino in Las Vegas (opps, guess I’m giving away the ending now, aren’t I?) because that’s what one of her friends had done when she married her gringo 4 or 5 years ago. She said that she wanted to go to a casino, but she did not want to go to THIS casino right NOW because we were in a very bad part of town and it was getting late, had already been dark for an hour or so, so we took a cab to her house where she fixed a great meal. But when we came back from Buga a day or two latter she noticed a casino in the bus station and said let’s give it a try. All they had was slots. We bought 4000pesos worth of the slot tokens (50pesos each) and Martha and Sandra each played for about half an hour on them. A few days later we went into another casino in Cosmocentro shopping mall and I gave Martha 5000pesos to play bingo (electronic, you against the machine, not you against the other players as it is in the US) and it took her over 2 hours to loose 5000 pesos…..that’s about $2.20US to gamble for two hours and she had great fun. And they even gave all 3 of us free drinks even though Sandra and I were just sitting there watching Martha play. We asked for coffee, don’t know for sure if they would have served a cocktail for free or not, come to think of it, I’m not sure they even serve alcohol, coffee might have been all they had. I kept looking around for a 21 table or a craps table but they didn’t have one, so I asked a change girl and she said that some of the bigger casinos downtown did have them and that you could play black jack and some kind of dice game (not sure from her explanation if it was regular craps or something else) for a minimum bet of 100pesos (what’s that, about 4 cents US?) per hand.
11. Martha’s cooking and cleaning:
Her house is immaculate and inexpensively but tastefully furnished and decorated. She was proud to point out that she had made the drapes and reupholstered the sofa and the two matching chairs herself. She loves to cook and she’s GREAT at it, her rule is “No, no hombres en la cocina!”, won’t even let me carry the used dishes to the sink—we spent a couple of days just hanging out at her house, and I swear, she fed me 5 meals a day and I LOST 4 inches off my waist, can prove it by which hole I put the belt buckle in now. She was very proud of that (I am about 30lbs over weight) and she says that with her healthy cooking she’ll have me back in shape in no time…hope she’s right, because her food is delicious. Oh, and people come pushing two wheel hand carts down the street, yelling out what kind of stuff they have to sell. We bought the best pineapple I’ve ever had (and the vendor peeled and sliced it) for 500pesos. That’s 20 cents! Martha asked me what a pineapple costs in the US and when I said “3 or 4 dollars, depending on where you get it” they almost didn’t believe me. Also, when we first arrived at the hotel, she and Sandra unpacked my suitcases and hung up and/or placed in the drawers everything and even paired up all the socks that I had just thrown in loose. And every couple of days, she did my laundry at her house (she has a washer but no dryer). Now guys, I’m not an AW basher (as in the insist that the man helps with the housework), but WOW! I sure didn’t expect this! She simply explained it that the cooking, cleaning and laundry is what a woman is SUPPOSED to do for her man. If she can’t give him good food and a nice place to stay, what good is she to him? It was quite plain to see that she would have been offended if I had told her “Oh, I’ll just put it in this hotel laundry bag and let them do it”. No sir, she wasn’t going to have her man pay good money to have strangers do HER duty. Guess this is part of the “traditional values” we hear so much about. Of course, there is also “man’s work” like moving heavy things for her, fixing the appliances (or hiring it done if its something beyond his mechanical ability), defending her from harm, both physical and stuff like insults or other guys coming on to her, and earning the money she needs to run the house. She expects me to take of these things properly and most important (she said this several times while I was there) to be FAITHFUL to her and treat her with RESPECT and be a good parent. Hey, no problem in those departments for me.
12. Taxis, busses and other means of transportation:
As several people have already reported, taxis are cheap and easy to get, no matter what hour. All except one of them was honest in the prices, one sent by the hotel instead of called directly or flagged down in the street----hmm, the only one that overcharged was the one provided by the hotel desk man (“don’t worry, lady, I’ll have my ‘special friend’ driver bring your boyfriend to your house, to make sure he doesn’t get cheated”, yeah, right---he should have charged me about 4000pesos and he charged me 8000, which made Martha so mad that she got his car number and telephoned to file a complaint against him with the taxi company). To go to the airport, we made “off the meter” arrangements with a driver we had used the afternoon before. He picked up Martha and Sandra in Barrio Cuidad de Cordoba at 3:30AM, as promised, came to the hotel, took us all to the airport, waited an hour and a half and then took them back to Cuidad de Cordoba, all for 30,000pesos, and anybody who knows how far it is to the airport should realize that is a GREAT price, considering that he waited so long and took them back also. Saw a lot of old US made Ford trucks and a few Dodge and Chevrolet trucks from the 1950’s still hauling stuff around town, not as “museum pieces” but still in daily use as actual working trucks. Oh, by the way, they all drive CRAZY down there, not just the Taxis, but everybody, bicycles, motor cycles at night with no lights, horse drawn wagons mixed in with motor vehicle traffic, running red lights and stop signs, weaving in and out like you wouldn’t believe, and don’t even ASK about the bus ride to and from Buga, man, I thought we had bought it a least 100 times, once our driver passed a semi which is passing a motorcycle with two women on it while THEY are passing a barely limping along Renault R4 with no lights….all this on a two lane road at night in a clearly marked no passing zone with another semi coming towards us in the other lane. Cripes! Even Martha was scared by this one, and that was just one instance out a 1000 on that trip alone. We survived, the semi slowed down and went to the shoulder and let us in, but it seemed like a matter of only about two inches that we missed. Amazingly, I didn’t see a single traffic accident the whole time I was there, although several times I thought I was going to BE in one. And the central bus station itself is a sight to behold…know all those old B budget movies where they stereotype and ridicule Latin American busses? Well, I think this is where they come to film them.
13. Nightclubs and dancing etc.
Sorry, nothing to report. Martha may well be the only woman in Cali who doesn’t like to dance or go to nightclubs. She’s not teetotaler, she keeps a couple small bottles of the creature around the house and a few beers in the refrigerator and served us all a round or two a couple of times, she just doesn’t like the ‘club scene’ so we didn’t go to any.
14. Agencies:
Sorry, didn’t go near one. This was a “one woman trip” and that one woman worked out great, so there was no need to visit an agency. I know this doesn’t help you guys who want to know “who’s got the best deal/prettiest/most sincere ladies etc. etc. right now?” but sorry, nothing to report along that line.
15. Agencies, from the women’s perspective:
I will pass this on, from Martha and company, to the guys who are looking (I told her about this board, she was cool with it and thought it was nice that we were all helping each other try to find somebody)….BUT guys, something to consider (shall we say “dirtying the water for the rest of us”, not pointing fingers at any specific person here on the board). Martha did NOT join an agency and her daughter does not want to join an agency either because they have heard too many tales of gringos using the old “come on baby, let’s have a little sample of ‘you know what’ to be sure we’re really compatible before we decide to get married” line and scoring with 4 or 5 different women on the same trip and then marrying NONE of them. True or not, they believed it and the neighbor chimed in “Oh, true, true, that happened to a friend of mine”. My guess? True, but I hope it is greatly exaggerated, just like the “they’re ALL gold diggers and visa sharks” talk some people say about the Colombian women.
16. Preaching to the Choir.
Which brings us to this. Almost every Colombian that I talked to, not just Martha & company, but taxi drivers, waiters, sales clerks, people at the zoo (Yes, we went there too, it’s not as big as say New York or even Dallas, but it’s not bad and the ladies love it, the Cali river flows through it and makes a nice background for some romantic photographs of you and your lady). Anyway, back on track, when they realized that I was ‘gringo’, several people asked me to tell all my US friends “Please tell them we are NOT a race of dope dealers, thieves, terrorists and prostitutes, we are proud and happy people who loved our beautiful country and we ourselves are the VICTIMS of the few bad ones”….of course most of you guys already know this, but I promised to pass it on.
17. How did I like Cali? (we’re getting near the end a last).
I loved it! Had a great time! The people are all great and friendly (with the couple of exceptions posted above). I thought that Cali was a beautiful, fun city, the layout and setting (in the valley surrounded by mountains) and the buildings and streets themselves reminded me a lot of Mexico City (although the payment of the streets in Cali is pretty terrible). Where Martha lives (Barrio Cuidad de Cordoba, officially a ‘strata 3’ zone, for those of you who understand the system and/or know where it is) would be considered VERY poor by US standards, but everybody knew each other and just being there you could feel they were truly a “community”. Remember the pineapple vendor? He saw Sandra standing on the balcony and said, “Hello, Srta. Sandra, would you ask you mother Dona Martha if she would like some fruit?” And Martha went out and said “Hello, Don Pedro, yes, if you have a really nice pineapple for me”….I mean the people in the barrio all KNOW each other. I was amazed and asked Sandra “Do you know everybody in the barrio?” and she said “Most of them”, and I pointed to a little girl walking down the street and said “What about her?” and she said “Sure, that’s little Maria, she’s six years old, she lives in that house with the pink front.”
18. Gringo sightings:
Except for one guy in one of the shopping centers, with TWO pretty girls, all 3 of them loaded down with bags and packages that he had apparently bought for them, I didn’t see a single other gringo the entire 10 days I was there, (nor hear any English spoken either, maybe I just didn’t hit the right parts of town, ha ha) until the morning I was leaving. There were 4 guys waiting for the American Airlines flight to Miami, which was loading at the gate next to mine. Only got to talk to them for about 2 minutes and didn’t get their names. I asked them if they had been down here looking to meet ladies and they all said yes and I asked them if they found any ladies to their liking and one of them said “Si, Senor! I sure did!”. I got the idea that he had definitely found one he liked a lot, so, happy for him even if I didn’t catch his name. Hey, maybe it was one of you guys? We’re talking Cali airport around 7 in the morning on the 28th. There were two real tall guys, one bald, a tall enough kind of husky (but not really fat, didn’t have the ‘gut’ like I do) guy about 45 or 50 and a regular sized blond guy about 35 (the one who had found his lady)….would those gentlemen happen to be any of you guys?
19 A video camera for Sandra.
A couple of months ago I got a decent video camera, brand new but a discontinued model, for $150, great deal. I brought it with me and I showed Sandra how to use it and she became the “official photographer” of my trip. Martha doesn’t have a VCR, but her TV does have the right kind of jacks such that you could plug the camera directly into the TV. The day before I was to leave, I gave Sandra an unopened pack of 3 tapes for the camera and told her she would need them. She asked “What for?” and I told her “To use in the camera, of course, it’s yours, my gift for being such a wonderful ‘soon to be’ daughter.” You would have thought I had just given her the keys to a brand new Mercedes! I had told Martha a couple of days before that I was going to give it to Sandra, but as I requested, she didn’t let on and Sandra was so surprised and happy that she was laughing and crying at the same time.
20 Money problems (or the gold digging gringo).
OK, Here’s where I have to admit that I made a very stupid and potentially dangerous mistake. Well, my bad. Money was tight on this trip. Too tight. I thought I had enough to squeak by, but I misjudged. Due to, ahem, er, uh, let us say the ‘financial circumstances’ of the dissolution of my prior marriage; no sane bank will trust neither me nor my X with a credit card, so I was using a MasterCard debit card. Suddenly, checking my account via internet, it’s 2pm the day before I’m supposed to leave and I realize I DON’T HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO PAY THE HOTEL BILL! I’M GOING TO BE ABOUT $150US SHORT! Not to mention the airport tax and the taxi to the airport. First we called a friend in Dallas, he was willing, but he’d never sent money overseas before and only speaks English and the place he tried to send it from was a little store in Dallas that I had used before, but they only spoke Spanish (a lot of that going around in Dallas, which is a whole ‘nother issue) and he was not successful and at 5pm sharp the place to claim the money closed and told us “Sorry, your money never came in, you can come back tomorrow and see if its in”. So we went back to Martha’s house and called the hotel and tried to convince them that I have direct deposit and a nice fat paycheck was going into my account at 8AM Friday morning and if they would just wait until then to post the charge against my card everything would be cool. Their response was a very unfriendly “Nothing doing, and our country has laws about what to do with people who don’t pay their hotel bills”. Best deal the hotel was willing to offer was “Stay here until Friday morning (paying for the extra days of course) and Friday morning we will run your card and if it goes through, then everything is cool, if it comes back ‘declined’…….well, you in a heap of trouble.” What happened, you ask? Well, I’m back aren’t I? Martha’s friend (not the executive’s wife, but the neighbor who originally met me at the airport) came through with a 400,000 peso loan. Her husband took the money out of the cash he operates his small business with. Thank You, Thank You, Thank You! And some people say these women are gold digging US? Not the women I met. Well, we paid off the hotel bill with as much as the MasterCard could take and the rest in cash. Martha and Sandra went home and came back at 3:30 in the morning (with the rest of my laundry, which had been hanging on her clothes line) and we all left for the airport. After giving Martha 30,000pesos to pay off the taxi driver, I went to pay the airport tax. They asked if I wanted to pay in US money (I think it was 28.00US) or 64,000 pesos. I said, “some of each currency please”, but they said no, you had to pay it all in one or the other. I had 63,000pesos in paper and some coins. Made it! I got out of Colombia with a $5.00US bill and about 2000pesos in coins, 15 cigarettes and a lighter that the Panamanians took away from me……boys, that’s cutting it close. They stayed with me until the last possible second before I had to go through security and we had one last kiss right as I entered the metal detector, then I had to wait about 2 hours in the ‘ticketed passengers only’ area until time to board the plane.
21 Back in Dallas
While looking for my luggage and an outlet to recharge my cell phone so I could call a friend to pick me up, I was surprised when my 15yo daughter walked up behind me and said “Hi, Daddy, I missed you so much” and gave me a hug. The X had actually come voluntarily to pick me up. Of course somebody had a wreck and we were stuck in a traffic jam on the expressway for an hour and then she wanted to go to her place first and when we got there she didn’t have her keys ---- What? Well, you obviously have your CAR keys, don’t you keep them together? ---No, why should I? This way I only loose one or the other, not the house and car at the same time (this is logic??) So she told me to take her car and go hunt up our son, who was in a class somewhere. I found him and he gave me his house key and returned to class. Then MacDonald’s got most of the $5.00 bill to buy a number 4 for my daughter. Then back to the X’s place, where she wanted to hear all about the trip. Yes, she knew the purpose of the trip and she wished we good luck before I left and said she was glad to hear that the new lady was going to work out….she claims that she actually wants me to be happy, just not with HER (and sometimes I almost believe her). OK, so we’ve talked an hour and looked through all the stuff I brought back, can we go now? I’ve been up since 3 this morning and I promised Martha I’d call and tell her I arrived safely. OK, let’s go, but wait, now X can’t find her glasses…proceed to look for glasses for an hour (she had them on when she picked me up, where did they go?) Finally, she allows as how she will wear her contacts, even though they don’t help that much at night….at last, I’m going home! Going to make that call---“Hi, Martha, I’m home safe, love you, going to bed, bye”….but NO, as we’re going to the car, a neighbor says “Your little dog (hers, not mine) got out of the fence and has run away”….proceed to look for dog for an hour, I finally find her unharmed and put her in the apartment, then rounded up the X and daughter. But now it is time for the son’s class to be over and it is raining cats and dogs…..drive around looking for son to pick him up for an hour, never find him (he holed up in a store to wait out the storm and then made it home on his own). Finally (at 10:30pm I was home. I make the call to Martha (she was getting worried, I told her I should be home by 7) and fell asleep.
22 In conclusion (at last!)
Just for the record, I’m 51yo divorced, Martha’s 39yo divorced (sorry “age police”, no case for you here) and we met last November on a free internet site (www.caliescali.com) and have been corresponding (at first via internet, but later mostly by phone three or four times a week) ever since.
And no, Martha was not the “first thing that came along”, I’ve been at this process for 2 1/2 years and have talked seriously to a 38yo from Bogota for a while but I knew she wasn’t the one, a 28yo from Bucaramanga, who was already in the US on an ‘overstayed’ tourist visa, had a job (off the books, of course), her own car and spoke decent English. Nice but too young for me (although she didn’t think so), and a 36yo from Bucaramanga (well, she’s 38 now), that ALMOST was the one, but in the end I lost her to another guy. I was hurt, but got over it and no hard feelings, hope she’s happy with him over there in Alabama, and wish them both the best, she’s expecting her first child in July or August and I’m happy for her—and yes, Martha knows about my sad experience with that one before meeting her.—Those of you who have been here a while might remember when that happened, somebody referred a Bucaramanga question—“ask Michael B, he probably knows, his girl is from there” and I replied “Not anymore, and I don’t want to discuss the details”. I don’t think she and her husband follow this board, but if they do, “Hello, and best wishes, tell Y. her mother’s prayers for me did pay off.”
After reading all this, out of politeness (or maybe even you actually do care) you want to ask, “Yeah, Mike, but is Martha the ONE for you?” Or more likely you want to ask “Does she have a friend (daughter) who would like to meet ME?” ….OK, here goes: Yes, Martha is the ONE, and now she’s wearing the nice emerald ring that I had bought about 2 years ago to be ready for when the right one showed up and had brought with me especially for the occasion. And NO, her daughter is NOT particularly interested in meeting a gringo, sorry guys, because she is a real doll, 8+ in looks and 10 in personality and any one of you would be delighted with her, but she not ‘in the market’. She’s going to finish her master’s degree from a legitimate university in August (Industrial Engineer) and hopefully we can help her get a job up here, maybe on an H1B visa or if that doesn’t work out we will try to sponsor her for a student visa (at 23, she’s too old to qualify for a visa as Martha’s child). She still needs a lot of work on her English, she’s only had the couple of the required beginning level courses and she’s probably level 2 (on a 10 scale). Martha’s English, on the other hand, consists of exactly 6 words, if you count my name, otherwise only 3 words, “I love you”. But she does want to learn and when she gets here we’ll enroll her in a Community College ESL class.
Well, I guess this sounds more of a “what I did on my summer vacation” report (or maybe a real long Creech and Chong skit) than something you can use for real information, but that’s the best I can do and I had a WONDERFUL time in Cali, in fact, if I take the minimum pension, I can retire in 6 years and wouldn’t mind retiring there, unless the ‘situation’ turns much worse, we’ll just have to see how well Uribe and his successor do. So, you’re all invited to the wedding (just kidding, I can’t afford to feed all of you, ha ha).
End of report, but will answer (serious and polite) questions.
